Pontas Rights List August 2014 by Pontas Literary & Film Agency

Highlights August 2014

A bridge between storytelling and cultures, between books and films www.pontas-agency.com

Susan Abulhawa Susan Abulhawa was born to refugees of the 1967 War, battle in which Israel captured what remained of Palestinian territory. In 2002 she founded Playgrounds for Palestine, an organization that builds and maintains playgrounds for children in Palestine. Her essays have appeared internationally in print and electronic news media and she is a contributing author to the anthologies Shattered Illusions and Searching Jenin. She currently lives in Pennsylvania, USA.

The Blue Between Sky and Water The Blue Between Sky and Water is a family story but it is also the story of daily heroines and extremely strong women that live and survive thanks to even styronger bounds built between a community that suffers the distress of a never ending war. We witness the stories of the great matriarch Nazmiyeh, her daughters and sons, and her granddaughters, craftily intertiwned through a tought but intelligent story that makes you laugh and cry, suffer and feel for Mamdouh, Nur, Khaled, and all the characters. Set between Palestine and the US, this is a novel that brightly interweaves political and family history. It is a very touching exploration of family and roots and how they define who we are, not only in Palestinian culture and history, but also on a very universal level.

Mornings in Jenin Palestine, 1948. The Abulheja family are forcibly removed from their ancestral home in Ein Hod and sent to live in a refugee camp in Jenin. Through the eyes of Amal, the bright granddaughter of the family´s patriarch, we witness the repercussions of the Israeli occupation on her family´s lives, specifically those of her two brothers. Ismael is kidnapped by an Israeli soldier and goes to battle for the Israeli cause while Yousef dedicates his life to the Palestinian cause, their opposing perspectives ultimately rendering the two brothers enemies. Amal’s own dramatic story threads its way through six decades of Israeli–Palestinian tension: it is a tale of love and loss, of childhood, motherhood and parenthood, and finally of her need to share history with her daughter, so as to preserve the most significant love she has. Richly told and brimming with humanity, Mornings in Jenin is an extraordinary debut. “An intensely beautiful fictionalized history that should be read by both politicians and those interested in contemporary politics. Highly recommended.” - Library Journal “A powerful and passionate novel - Michael Palin “Never had I read a more fascinating novel about Palestine an Israel. It gave me insight and afected me emotionally in the way only great novels do.” - Henning Mankell 2

Original language: English Manuscript 322 pages

Federico Axat Federico Axat was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1975. His first novel, Benjamin, was published in Spain by Suma de Letras and in Italy by Sperling & Kupfer. His stories stand out for a high dose of suspense, plot twists and surprising and unexpected endings.

The Meadow of the Butterflies Year after year, people keep going missing under mysterious circumstances in Carnival Falls. Some residents are sure the tragedies have no relation to each other, while still others are convinced something far more sinister than simple accident underlies these baffling deaths. In 1985, 12 year olds Sam and Billy have big expectations for the summer ahead; excursions into the forest, leisurely bicycle rides in the sun and plans to build a treehouse. However when the posh, gorgeous Miranda moves to town, everything is turned upside down. Together they embark on the intricate road from childhood to adolescence, a journey that will lead them to knowledge, revelation and an unexpected adventure that could unravel the mystery of their town´s disappearances…

Original title: El pantano de las mariposas Original language: Spanish Published in 2013 486 pages

RIGHTS SOLD SPANISH | Destino COMPLEX CHINESE | Doing Publishing PORTUGUESE (Brazil) | Alaúde English sample available

A coming of age novel rife with startling suspense and moments of fantasy, The Meadow of the Butterflies immerses the reader in Axat´s fascinating world, culminating in an astonishing final twist no one will see coming. “This is an absolutely beautiful novel. Side by side with on oldstyle flair, a certain timeless tone, some elements of both style and plot contrast break in occasionally, sharp, groundbreaking elements. One of these would be the end of the novel. Well, well, well, what an end! ” - Silvia Sesé, Ediciones Destino “The Meadow of the Butterflies has it all: a well-built story, characters easy to identify with, the appropriate dosing in the plot and a beautiful writing that endows the reading with a really special charm.” -Blog Planeta de Libros. “Federico Axat provides us with a portrait of what friendship means in the most difficult moments. A walk from childhood into adolescence, a tough story, with again an excellent final twist. You will discover, with this novel, why Axat is one of the authors with a better renown in the last years. .” -Crónicas Literarias desde NY

www.pontas-agency.com

Other titles by Federico Axat: Benjamin (2010)

Marie Bennett Marie Bennett (Malmö, 1969) studied Art History in the University of Lund, Sweden, and Journalism in the City University, England. She lived in Paris, California and Madrid before landing in London, where she settled to work in media and as a reader for different UK publishing houses and where she has lived with her family for the last 18 years. Hotell Angleterre is her first novel.

Hotell Angleterre Sweden, 1940-1944. The Second World War rages in neighboring occupied Denmark, German bombs falling over Copenhagen, just a stone-throw away from Malmö. Though Sweden is supposed to be neutral, the war is knocking on its door and there is a great paranoia against Communists and other “social enemies” throughout the country, and also a fear of spies and traitors. It is a period of rationing, insecurity, censorship, military abuse and harsh winters, when the worst thing you could call someone was not “Nazi” but “communist”.

Original title: Hotell Angleterre Original language: Swedish Manuscript 542 pages

The story in Hotell Angleterre takes off during the dramatic but today completely forgotten event that took place during this time in the North of Sweden, when a couple of Swedish soldiers froze to death during the winter of 1939 and, as a consequence of this, the other soldiers mutinied against officers. The novel follows the lives of Georg, a young soldier from Malmö that gets sent to the North, his wife Kerstin, who remains at home witnessing the war in Europe from the front seat, and the enigmatic Viola, suspected of being a spy and with whom Kerstin maintains a brief affair during her husband’s absence. Their lives, like everyone’s at the time, are torn by war, politics and fear. Love, betrayal, compassion and forgiveness, and the universal human will to survive and move forward in the face of adversity, are all present in this unputdownable and gripping debut by Marie Bennett.

www.pontas-agency.com

Alfredo de Braganza Alfredo de Braganza is an award-winning independent filmmaker. His documentary Smoking Babas-Holy Men of India was selected for the Madrid International Film Festival and his film Maayan The Fisherman for Best Narrative Film at the Florida International Film Festival. He is regarded as the first Spanish person to make a feature film in India, on celluloid, Indian actors and native language. His documentary Boxing Babylon won Best Documentary Awards at Norway Film Festival and New Delhi International Sports Film Festival.

Amrita Sings the Blues Amrita Sher-Gil was born in Budapest in 1913 in a bourgeois family. Her parents were outgoing and quirky characters: her mother was a Jewish Hungarian and her father an Indian Sikh. Amrita studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Her charismatic presence, beauty and physical charms captivated both men and women. With the magnetism of her personality she was able to take down the artificial barriers imposed by the censors of the Victorian morality. However, her secret love affair with the first Prime Minister of Independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, and her numerous sex scandals, exacerbated her figure till the most infamous social ignominy. Amrita died in India, in very mysterious circumstances, at the young age of 28. Her figure has gone unnoticed by both the Indian and international public.

Original title: Amrita Original language: Spanish Manuscript 234 pages

RIGHTS SOLD SPANISH | Suma de Letras México/España

Amrita Sings the Blues is the first fictional approach to the life of this enigmatic woman considered as the Frida Kahlo of India. Her life was remarkable in every way: epic, exotic, tragic, intense, political and romantic. Although today her artwork is one of the most expensive in India, her figure has been disowned and has gone unnoticed even after the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of her birth last year.

• A novelized biography of the largely-unknown life of Amrita Sher-Gil, described as “India’s Frida Kahlo” “The best book on Amrita. A wholly absorbing and brilliant novel like the novels no one seems to write anymore. I highly recommend it to all foreigners in order to understand India through such extraordinary character. “ - Khushwant Singh “One of the best novels with brilliant craftsmanship I have read. A remarkable achievement. A must read for understanding British India through the live of such an enigmatic and engaging young woman. Entertaining, serious and accurate in its historical and social observations. The story grabs you like an intelligent crafted movie that you cannot help watching.” - Ashokamitran

www.pontas-agency.com

Blanca Busquets Blanca Busquets (Barcelona, 1961) is a writer and journalist. In 2011 her fifth novel, La nevada del cucut, was awarded the Premi Llibreter, the Catalan Booksellers Award, a significant prize which immediately became a milestone in her literary career. She is now translated into Spanish, Italian, French, Norwegian, Russian and German and is recognized unanimously as a prominent figure of contemporary Catalan literature.

Half Spoken Words Every family has a secret. Set in central Catalonia between 1982 and the present, Half Spoken Words is Blanca Busquets’ most accomplished novel so far.

Original title: Paraules a mitges Original language: Catalan To be published in 2014 208 pages RIGHTS SOLD CATALAN | Rosa dels Vents / Penguin Random House SPANISH | Grijalbo / Penguin Random House

The House of Silence A violin lost and found is the thread that winds through this tightly-crafted suspense story of love across class lines. This engaging novel is told in alternating voices, revealing the perspectives and true motivations of three women and one man, bound together by music and their relationship with a charismatic orchestra director who emigrated to Barcelona from behind the Iron Curtain.

Original title: La casa del silenci Original language: Catalan Published in 2013 236 pages

RIGHTS SOLD

The love of music they share is tempered by ambition, envy and greed,which simmer to a crescendo on the evening of a classical concert in Berlin, when the presence of an old lady in the audience makes some members of the orchestra very nervous.

Who is the rightful owner of this exquisite violin?

English sample available

What is more important in a musician: mastering technique or playing from the depths of their heart? And, as secrets come to light, how far will some people go to seek revenge? Set between Germany and Spain throughout the 20th century, this romantic page-turner keeps readers guessing until the final revelation, a love letter to seek beyond the grave. “A signora of Catalan literature, a heiress of the great Mercè Rodoreda” Glamour Magazine

Other titles by Blanca Busquets: Snow Prison The Jumper Train to Puigcerdà The Last Snow Who Knows Where The Sky Is

www.pontas-agency.com

Leila S. Chudori Leila S. Chudori (Jakarta, 1962) is Indonesia’s most prominent and outspoken female journalist. She works at TEMPO News Magazine of Indonesia since 1989 . She also is considered one of Indonesia’s boldest story-tellers and is a well-known figure in the Indonesian literary scene. She is the author of several anthologies of short stories, a novel, TV and film scripts. Leila lives in Jakarta with her daughter, Rain ChudoriSoerjoatmodjo.

Homecoming Pulang is both a family saga and a story of exile and homecoming, set against the background of historical events in Paris and Indonesia. These events include two dark and violent periods of Indonesia’s history: the 1965 communist purge that marked the rise of the longest-serving Indonesian president Soeharto, and his fall in 1998. The novel has been described by The Jakarta Globe as “an epic, an ambitious slab of fiction crammed with a rich and diverse cast of characters whose lives have been swept along by Indonesia’s dramatic and at times extremely tragic contemporary history.(...) A wonderful exercise in humanism. It is first and foremost a story about love, passion as well as a sensual — almost primordial — attachment to the land. (...) Chudori balances the grand and bloody national narrative with an intimate and deeply-felt evocation of how the drama and violence of those years and indeed of the subsequent Reformasi period was played out family by family, individual by individual. On a certain level, “Pulang” is also an extended love letter to Indonesia, an evocation of a mood, a state of mind and a place”.

Original title: Pulang Original language: Bahasa Indonesia Published in 2013 474 pages

RIGHTS SOLD BAHASA INDONESIA | Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia DUTCH | De Geus ENGLISH (South East Asia) | Lontar

Righs represented on behalf of the Lontar Foundation.

To achieve the rich wealth of historical detail in Pulang, Leila spent six years researching, reading and conducting interviews with Indonesian political exiles living in Paris, such as Oemar Said and Sobron Aidit, owners of Restaurant Indonesia. •“A prodigious and impressive storyteller” The Jakarta Globe •“Pulang is a novel I’ve been waiting to read — a book of grandeur and intimacy, love and brutality, a book that envelops you into the cultural, historical and geographical vortex that is Indonesia, without for once ever losing its eagle-eyed focus on the human soul. This is an important work, sophisticated, wise and poignant from a novelist at the height of her powers.” Karin Raslan – The Jakarta Globe •“This novel lifted grey shadows from the history of our country, not in terms of political and ideological understandings, but more from the point of view of those who were lost, who were separated from their families, figures who longed for a home they couldn’t return to.” - Goodreads

www.pontas-agency.com

David Castillo David Castillo is a journalist, critic, novelist, poet and a tireless cultural activist. As a journalist he wrote for El País and La Vanguardia and in the 1990s he became director of the Culture Supplement of Avui. He has coordinated the Barcelona Poetry Week since 1995. He is also a prizewinning novelist with El cel de l’infern (Hell’s Sky, 1999), winner of the Joan Crexells Prize, and No miris enrere (2001), winner of the Sant Jordi Prize. All his novels have been translated into Spanish by Anagrama.

Barcelona Does Not Exist Barcelona. Year 2040, approximately. The Old City, basically the city behind the old walls and the old Raval quarter, continues to be in the hands of the organizations that retain power. However, outside this perimeter the neighborhoods are controlled by the so-called “Youth Squadrons”, groups of youthworshiping teenagers who are ruled by a capricious 5-year-old self-proclaimed King. The protagonist and narrator of the novel is an exwriter who survives in an old apartment downtown (in the Old City) and who earns his current living as a journalist for government-owned newspaper. He knows Barcelona like the back of his hand and knows all the secret escape routes from the city centre, even if some of them are quite dangerous. His boss, the owner of one of the newspapers he works for, commissions him to write about the Youth Squadrons, allowing him to get closer to the decisionmaking power circle of these groups. When his reportage is practically finished, his boss is suddenly found dead... but is it a murder o a suicide?

Original title: Barcelona no existeix Original language: Catalan Published in 2014 140 pages

RIGHTS SOLD CATALAN | Empúries

English sample available

• A “dystopian urban western” that offers an apocalyptic vision of a post-crisis city without any morals, governed, or rather nongoverned, in a Mad Max style. It’s a short, fun, explosive and thought-provoking read. “Barcelona does not exist, David Castillo’s latest novel (…) contains all the virtues of the great short novel: compression, fragmentation, intensity, precision, clarity, atmosphere, psychology, cultural references.” – El Mundo “David Castillo combines several of the elements that define one of the contemporary sci-fi referents, the movie Blade Runner: love, professional honor code, megalopolis governed by different groups and uncertainty about the future ahead.” – El Punt “In David Castillo’s work his cultural and intellectual references meet the sordid world of the brothels, the night clubs and the world of magic, spiritualism and fortune-telling.” – El Punt 8

www.pontas-agency.com

Michelle Cohen Corasanti

Michelle Cohen Corasanti has a BA from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a MA from Harvard University, both in Middle Eastern Studies. She also holds a law degree. A Jewish American, she lives in the US with her husband and two children. The Almond Tree is her first novel amd has been translated into 14 languages.

The Almond Tree The Almond Tree is a rags-to-riches tale with a Palestinian protagonist spanning from the 1950s to the present with a broad international appeal. The book is broken up into four parts that take place over different periods of a young Palestinian boy´s life. Gifted with a mind that continues to impress the elders in his village, Ichmad Hamid struggles with the knowledge that he can do nothing to save his Palestinian friends and family. Ruled by the Israeli military government, the entire village operates in fear of losing homes, jobs, and belongings. But more importantly, they fear losing each other. On Ichmad’s twelfth birthday, that fear becomes a reality. With his father imprisoned, his family’s home and possessions confiscated, and his siblings quickly succumbing to the dangers of war, Ichmad begins the endless struggle to use his intellect to save his poor and dying family and reclaim a love for others that was lost when the bombs first hit. “A story that grabs you from the first page and makes your heart go out to the Palestinians without pointing fingers at anyone.” -Guillermo Fesser, The Huffington Post “Let’s make this the next Kite Runner!” -Ricciarda Barbieri, editor at Feltrinelli “If you enjoyed The Kite Runner or In the Shadow of the Banyan, you will want to read The Almond Tree“ -Carol Fitzgerald, co-Founder/ President of The Book Report Network

• An accessible novel with a literary appeal that exposes the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from the Palestinian point of view, which is both entertaining and thought provoking.

www.pontas-agency.com

Original language: English Published in 2012 348 pages www.thealmondtreebook.com

Imraan Coovadia Imraan Coovadia is a writer and director of the creative writing programme at the University of Cape Town. His fiction has been published in a number of countries, and he has written for N+1, Agni, the New York Times, Boston Globe, Times of India, and South Africa’s Mail Guardian and Sunday Independent. He graduated from Harvard College. His family has been involved in politics since his great-uncle Ebrahim was thrown off an electric tram in Johannesburg in 1906 as part of Mahatma Gandhi’s attempt to test the legal standing of discriminatory laws in what was then the South African Republic.

Tales of the Metric System Inspired by books like David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten and Chimamanda Adichie’s Half a Yellow Sun, and films like The Lives of Others and Kieslowski’s Dekalog, Tales of the Metric System tells the story of modern South Africa one day at a time from high apartheid to the staging of the World Cup forty years later. 1970. Anne Rabie reckons with the expulsion of her son Henry from a private boarding school, with the difficulties of being under the surveillance of the security police because of her husband’s political activities, and with the various participants in the Free University.

Original language: English Manuscript To be published in 2014 360 pages RIGHTS SOLD ENGLISH (South Africa) | Struik Random House

1973. A young black man who lives in a workers’ boarding house finds that the pass he needs to show to travel around the city has been stolen. Victor needs to find it before the end of the day. 1979. Yash, a working-class Indian, plays rock guitar in segregated bars and restaurants. Yash takes his son around with him to plead for the chance to keep playing. These characters and those involved with them return, always for a day at a time, and face the new situations brought about by the conflict. The novel covers the changes in the artistic, political, and intellectual life of South Africa and its social conditions beginning in the high apartheid period and following these circumstances as the old system disintegrates. The characters are black, white, Indian, ranging from the privileged and disaffected, including professors and philosophers, to working class characters, and individuals and communities at the margins of the society. • A novel that lifts the lid off South Africa’s hidden and lesser known history and goes deep into the craks of national identity “Coovadia is the symptom of new cultural and critical energies bursting to reshape the South African literary canon and the way it is viewed in the world” - Monica Popescu, author of South African Literature Beyond the Cold War ‘One of South Africa’s most impressive voices.’ - Margaret von Klemperer, The Witness 10

www.pontas-agency.com

Mainak Dhar Mainak Dhar is a cubicle dweller by day and author by night. His first `publishedâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; work was a stapled collection of Maths solutions and poems (he figured nobody would pay for his poems alone) he sold to his classmates in Grade 7, and spent the proceeds on ice cream and comics. He was first published in a more conventional sense at the age of 18 and has since published ten books including the Amazon science fiction bestseller Vimana.

Alice in Deadland Civilization as we know it ended more than fifteen years ago, leaving as its legacy barren wastelands called the Deadland and a new terror for the humans who survived: hordes of undead Biters. Fifteen year-old Alice has spent her entire life in the Deadland, her education consisting of how best to use guns and knives in the ongoing war for survival against the Biters. One day, Alice spots a Biter disappearing into a hole in the ground and follows it, in search of fabled underground Biter bases. What Alice discovers there propels her into an action-packed adventure that changes her life and that of all humans in the Deadland forever. An adventure where she learns the terrible conspiracy behind the ruin of humanity, the truth behind the origin of the Biters, and the prophecy the mysterious Biter Queen believes Alice is destined to fulfill. â&#x20AC;˘ Alice in Deadland was released in November 2011 and quickly became an Amazon.com bestseller, selling more than 50,000 copies in its first three months.

Original language: English Published in 2011 230 pages www.mainakdhar.com RIGHTS SOLD ENGLISH (India) | Westland FRENCH | Pocket TURKISH | Elf Yayinlari Other titles in the series: Through the Killing Glass Off With Their Heads Hunting the Snark TV & Film rights sold to Paper Airplane Productions

Zombiestan It began with stories of undead Taliban rampaging through Afghan villages, and faster than anyone could have anticipated, the darkness spreads through the world. In a world laid waste by this new terror, four unlikely companions have been thrown together- a seventeen year old boy dealing with the loss of his family, a US Navy SEAL trying to get back home, an aging, lonely writer without anyone to live for, and a young girl trying to keep her three year old brother safe. When they discover that the smallest amongst them holds the key to removing the scourge that threatens to destroy their world, they begin an epic journey to a rumoured safe zone high in the Himalayas. The journey pits them against their own worst fears and the most terrible dangers- both human and undead. www.pontas-agency.com

Original language: English Published in 2012 202 pages RIGHTS SOLD ENGLISH (India) | Westland ENGLISH (ex-India) | Severed Press (Australia)

Pete Fromm A native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Pete Fromm attended the University of Montana, earning a degree in Wildlife Biology with high honors in 1981. After working for several years as a river ranger in Grand Teton National Park, Pete turned to writing full time in 1990, including several Pushcart Prize nominations, and four Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Book of the Year Awards.

If Not For This Maddy and Dalt meet in their early twenties while working on the Snake River, Wyoming, as river guides. Their romance takes off beneath the Grand Tetons, but priced out of the Jackson Hole area they’d worked so hard to bring people to, they set off on their own, starting Halfmoon Whitewater in Ashland, Oregon. Young, wildly in love, they bull through the tight years, their growing frustration over the failure to get pregnant. Maddy’s mononucleosis is only a nuisance, the bouts of dizziness only annoying. Finally, Dalt in Mongolia guiding Taimen fisherman, Maddy stays behind for further tests, discovering not only is she, at last, pregnant, but that the mono is not mono, but the beginning of multiple sclerosis. Dalt comes home, the baby, named Attila after their favorite Mongol, thrives, and is followed by a girl, Izzy. Dalt turns to carpentry for the health benefits they need, and Maddy too leaves the rivers, raising her children.

Original language: English To be published in 2014 227 pages

RIGHTS SOLD ENGLISH (World) | Red Hen Press FRENCH | Gallmeister

Through the following decades they treat the MS like any other obstacle that’s come their way, strengthened by it rather than diminished. Beautifully written, subtle in its development of the years, the love that sees them through, If Not For This is a stunning love story, moving, heartbreaking, yet still just and funny. Driven always by Maddy’s pitch perfect voice--river guide, lover, mother--readers will live Maddy’s life with her and never forget her. • A story of indomitable love set along the wild rivers of the American West, by the author of Indian Creek Chronicles and As Cool As I am. • “A rich, deeply felt book, so full of kindness and kind people that it’s an absolute phenomenon” -Ron Carlson, author of The Signal • “A terrific novel, poignant as hell, but feisty, funny and romantic, too. Pete Fromm is a powerful, lucid writer, a perfect guide to the unpredictable rivers and people of the interior West, to their deep channels and breathtaking turns” -Jess Walter

www.pontas-agency.com

Susana Fortes

Susana Fortes (Pontevedra, Spain, 1959) graduated with a degree in American History from Universidad de Barcelona. Her works have been translated into 20 languages, and her name can be found as the winner or finalist of many prestigious prizes. With her first novel, Querido Corto Maltés, she won the 1994 Premio Nuevos Narradores. In 2001 she was a finalist in the Premio Primavera, given by Espasa for her novel Fronteras de arena. El amante albanés was declared finalist of the largest Spanish language literary award, the Premio Planeta, in 2003.

Love Is Not for Poets Madrid, 1935. A young American woman arrives at the student dorm, where the crème de la crème of the Republican intellectuals reunites. Real and fictional characters intersect in the city streets. The famous evenings at La Colina de los Chopos attracts artists, musicians, dandies, poets, careerists, dreamers and students from everywhere. This glamorous and translucent atmosphere suddenly explodes when the body of a student appears floating in a nearby canal.

Original title: El amor no es un verso libre Original language: Spanish Published in 2013 250 pages RIGHTS SOLD SPANISH | Suma de Letras/ Santillana

This will be also the beginning of an intense love story between the newly arrived American girl and a prestigious and skeptical teacher who placed his life at a difficult crossroads. A forbidden and passionate romance that runs parallel to the crime shadows. The protagonists are caught in a web of intrigues, scandals and secrets of state of first scale that may cost their lives. Crime novel, political thriller and an unforgettable love story come together in a wraparound plot that travels like a movie camera across the criminal record of spanish history. “Susana Fortes novelizes the Spanish Bloomsbury.” – Levante • A great American-European love story set between the two world wars, with a background of politics and suspense • A novel about a small part of the history of old Europe –cultural effervescence in Madrid before the Spanish Civil War- seen through the eyes of a foreigner, for readers who enjoyed The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain, Above All Things by Tanis Rideout, Rules of Civility, by Amor Towles or Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan. • Loosely based on the true love affair between the Spanish poet and member of the “Generation of ‘27” Pedro Salinas and Katherine Whitmore, a young American professor from Kansas who inspired him to write some of the most beautiful love poems of contemporary Spanish literature.

www.pontas-agency.com

Other titles by Susana Fortes:

Brandon S. Graham

An unrepentant Southerner by birth, Brandon S. Graham has lived in eight states and four countries, receiving three university degrees. He worked as a commercial pressman and an adjunct professor in Missouri and as a gallery director in Nebraska. He studied in Budapest Hungary and Dijon France, with a summer spent as a barman at Woolpack inn in Chilham, England. He eventually settled near Chicago where he studied visual and written narrative at Columbia College Center for Book and Paper Arts, graduating with his MFA in 2008.

Good for Nothing Good For Nothing follows the episodic escapades of Flip Mellis, an unemployed, newly obese and suicidal family man, who is reaching the apex of a middleage tantrum. Exacerbated by plentiful personal flaws, including a self-fulfilling fatalism, and coinciding with a national economic crisis, Flip’s good intentions are tainted by his poor life skills and questionable rationalizations. The result of which is a darkly humorous social satire that explores men’s attitudes toward work, love, family, women, sex, and consumer culture. Tone, approachable language, pace, and absurd juxtapositions drive the story. Below the surface, an earnest exploration of the American male, his strengths and shortcomings, his inflated self-concept and his ignorant, self-hating abusiveness gives weight to the playfully circuitous and subversive story arc. The question is: are Flip’s best efforts enough to lead him to personal redemption and grace or will they merely lead to a futile, purely graceless and quixotic death spasm.

Original language: English Published in 2014 321 pages

RIGHTS SOLD ENGLISH (UK & Ireland) | Skyscraper

“Brandon Graham is a very funny, painfully observant, no-holdsbarred American writer. In Good for Nothing he shows us America now: out of work, out of shape, slightly suicidal but retaining a sharp sense of the absurd. This is a brilliant book. When times are really horrible it’s good to be able to laugh (especially at ourselves).” Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveller’s Wife

“Really looks like I’ll be free by mid-afternoon. MRI at 1pm. Meanwhile now enchanted by Good For Nothing: overlooked.” -Stephen Fry

• Influenced by the post-modern deconstructions of Paul Auster and Donald Barthelme and movies such as Sideways, Shortcuts, The Descendants, American Beauty and Punch-drunk Love.

www.pontas-agency.com

Ayesha Harruna Attah Born to two Ghanaian journalists, Ayesha Harruna Attah grew up in Accra. At age 17, she moved to Massachusetts and studied Biochemistry at Mount Holyoke College. Feeling the tug of her right brain, she went on to pursue an MS in Journalism from Columbia University. In 2009, with a fellowship from Per Ankh Publishers and TrustAfrica, she published her first novel, Harmattan Rain, shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Best First Book in 2010. Ayesha shuttles back and forth between Accra and Brooklyn. Saturday’s Shadows was loosely inspired by her mother falling ill when she was 12, and by her ceaseless nostalgia for the 90s.

Saturday’s Shadows A thin line exists between sanity and madness, learn the protagonists of Saturday’s Shadows, as they try to find and hold on to love in the volatile world of 1990s West Africa. After a 17-year military dictatorship, the members of the middle class Avoka family lurch towards destruction as their country is trying to find its footing. The father, Theo, is recruited to write the memoirs of the dictatorturned-president whom he both loathes and reveres. Zahra, matriarch of the Avoka household, rekindles an affair with an old lover and barely keeps her family and sanity together. Theo and Zahra’s son Kojo has just started the boarding school of his dreams but finds out sometimes dreams should remain dreams. Their help, Atsu, a recent transplant from the village, struggles to understand big city living with all its temptations- money, men and lust- and a family in which the mother doesn’t posses a single domestic bone. The climate they live in is politically complex, a time so tenous the country could easily dip back into its military past. Saturday’s Shadows shows “us how true Africans live in the 21st century” and is “a departure from the traditional method of depicting literary Africans as folks who always lived in the past.” It’s also “a study in the psychology of tyrants and how their rule destroys not only their subjects but themselves.”- Mohammed Nassehu-Ali (author of The Prophet of Zongo Street) • Influenced by Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Saturday’s Shadows allows its four characters to narrate how they will do almost anything to find themselves. “Who says that there are no good authors coming from Ghana? Shut up! Have you read Ayesha Harruna Attah?” -Ama Ata Aidoo, in BBC Africa World Service www.pontas-agency.com

Original language: English 250 pages To be published in 2014

RIGHTS SOLD ENGLISH (World) | World Editions DUTCH | De Geus

Susana Hernández Susana Hernández (Barcelona), studied Audiovisual Communications and Social Integration and currently combines studies of Private Investigation with studies of Psychology at the Universitat de Barcelona. Her published works include: La casa roja (awarded with Premi Ciudad de Sant Adrià 2005), Curvas peligrosas (Editorial Odisea 2010), and La puta que leía a Jack Kerouac (Lesrain 2007).

Contra las cuerdas A fresh Mediterranean crime novel with an unforgettable protagonist. Rebeca Santana and Miriam Vázquez are two police detectives from Barcelona. Rebecca likes to ride her Harley Davison, wears torn jeans and Adidas sweaters. Being gay, her fight against the homophobic atmosphere within the police force is often more tiring than her fight against criminal activities on the streets. Rebeca and Miriam are confronted with an unusual case of a serial rapist and serial killer, operating in the outskirts of Barcelona, along the ugly and touristy Costa Dorada.

Original language: Spanish Published in 2013 290 pages RIGHTS SOLD SPANISH | Alrevés

Shortlisted as best crime novel of 2012 by Valencia Negra Festival.

The victims are all brutally raped with a knife, and appear killed for pleasure. The murders take on deeper significance for Rebecca when the sixth victim is someone close to her heart. Rebecca must race against the clock to save a new victim, all the while dealing with an unexpected change in her already fraught relationship with her mother, a myriad of personal problems and a mysterious new stalker. Humor, action, mystery, sharp dialogue and unforgettable, no-frills attitude characters make Contra las cuerdas a hugely entertaining read. “If there’s a name which deserves to be among the list of rising Spanish crime authors it is Susana Hernández. Hernández knows how to grab the reader from the first line. And that is exactly what she does. To let yourself be carried away is a real pleasure.” -Care Santos, El Cultural, author of Las habitaciones cerradas and literary critic “Reading Susana Hernández one feels like one is reading something really new and excellent. She displays great competence with the placements, conflicts and characters in her novels. They all special and complex and become interesting and irresistible to the reader.” -Lorenzo Silva, El Mundo, Winner of the Premio Planeta 2012 • An Almodovar-style-thriller with a very strong, female and violent edge 16

www.pontas-agency.com

A. E. Hochschild A. E. Hochschild lives in London. Previously he was a journalist writing news and cultural features throughout Latin America. He has spent long stints in the Amazon and has sailed in the Arctic and Antarctic. He has an MA in History from Trinity College, Dublin. Whilst at university, he travelled to Poland, whereupon he became friends with many of the characters in the pages of The Countess & the Bear. He has adapted The Countess & the Bear as a film screenplay and is writing his second novel.

The Countess & The Bear The Countess & the Bear is set in a medieval hamlet in the Tatra Mountains, in the 1980s and during Poland’s last Communist Government. Courting the daughter of the last owner of the village of Tarkowice, the newly arrived militiaman learns of the villagers’ ambitious plot to earn some much needed money. Harking back to their grander old days, the plan involves re-establishing the estate of Tarkowice as a hunting destination for rich tourists from the West. Finally an eccentric Englishman is fooled into coming to shoot the non-existent bears in the forest. As the political situation worsens with the imposition of Martial Law, it is up to the love-struck and unlikely militiaman to outwit his fanatical superiors, as the great master plan goes dramatically wrong. The Countess & The Bear is a quirky, funny story with a loveable ensemble of colourful characters, with whom the reader becomes very attached. It is plot, as opposed to a dialogue driven novel.

“Hochschild has a unique understanding of these people, and of the pathos in their tiny but all-important disasters. He writes with the hilarious sadness that is at the heart of the best comedy.” -Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey • In tone, The Countess & the Bear it is a peculiar mixture of The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. It also has the feel of Emir Kusturica’s film Black Cat, White Cat.

www.pontas-agency.com

Original language: English Manuscript 248 pages

Sándor Jászberényi Sándor Jászberényi (Sopron, Hungary, 1980) works as a correspondent in conflict zones for several Hungarian newspapers and currently lives in Cairo, Egypt. He studied literature, philosophy and Arabic at the university ELTE, in Budapest. He has covered the Darfur crisis, the cast lead operation in the Gaza Strip, the Huthi uprising in Yemen and the Egyptian and the Libyan revolutions. He has interviewed several armed Islamist organizations, including the Islamic Jihad in Palestine, considered a terrorist organization by the US and Europe. His stories have been published in English in Pilvax and BODY magazines.

The Devil is a Black Dog And Other StoThe collection includes 14 stories about war, seen from many different perspectives, but always with the individual at the centre: the mother, the soldier, the martyr, the religious man, the journalist, etc.. Together, they form a kaleidoscope of mini-worlds, of moments, of decisions… And all together put a face, an emotion, a thought, behind humans confronted by war and conflict. Sándor is currently based in Cairo and his writing comes from his experiences covering all the Arab revolutions and the conflicts in the Middle East during the last few years. From Benghazi to Yemen, he has been on the very front line of danger, approaching journalism from a extreme point of view. In times of the newspaper and media crisis, The Devil is a Black Dog and Other Stories is a perfect example of how to give meaning to journalism today, how it can help us interpret the world, what journalism in capital letters – when it becomes literature - means.

Original language: Hungarian 130 pages Published in 2013

RIGHTS SOLD ENLISH (US) | New Europe Books HUNGARIAN | Kallingram ITALIAN | Edizioni Anfora

English translation available

“Fiercely precise, tight and violent – Jászberényi’s book is beautifully constructed, tough and exciting prose.” - György Dragomán, Hungarian author of The White King, translated into 28 languages “Jászberényi is brutally frank in his stories of how the civil strife– wracked Africa and Middle East have not only demeaned the value of life and death but also killed the sensitivity of reporters and photographers to these horrors even while they seek to provoke the moral outrage of the outside world.” -David Ottaway, former Washington Post correspondent in Africa and the Middle East • A selection of stories, half way between fiction and non fiction, that resonate with the works of Tim O’Brien, Kevin Powers, John Lee Anderson, etc

www.pontas-agency.com

Sara Lövestam Sara Lövestam, born 1980, teaches Swedish to immigrants and is a freelance journalist. In spring 2009 she won the debutant novel-prize Bok-SM for her first novel, Udda (Different). Her second novel, I havet finns så många fiskar (In the Deep Blue Sea) was received in 2011 with wonderful praise and was chosen “The book of the month” in Bonniers Book Club with more than 20 000 hard cover copies sold. Her third novel, Tillbaka till henne (Back to Her), is an ambitious book about the suffragattes and the history of the women’s right to vote, connecting a young contemporary woman with one of the European heroines behind the Women’s Suffrage Movement. Sara is a new, brave literary voice with a steady group of staunch readers, growing at each novel.

Heart of Jazz What can a bullied teenager learn from an old man spending his days in a retirement home? For example, she’ll learn that it ain’t got a thing, if it ain’t got that swing. For Steffi, every day at school is a nightmare. Her biggest bully is the popular girl, Karro, who cannot rest one day without telling Steffi what a disgusting nobody she is, and noone is strong or mature enough to argue with her. Steffi’s way to survive is through music. She plays the bass and listens to music as soon as she gets a chance. But running on her mp3 player are not the usual teen idols. It’s Povel Ramel, the quirky jazz musician who got his first taste of fame in the 1940’s. His songs are happy, funny, full of play with words and no hatred. They take away the pain.

Original title: Hjarta av jazz Original language: Swedish 250 pages Published in 2013 RIGHTS SOLD GERMAN | Rowohlt SPANISH | Suma de Letras SWEDISH | Piratförlaget English sample available

• “Poetic, well written, insightful and encouraging, this unusual novel underscores what anyone with odd and rewarding interests already knows: nerds have the richest lives.” • “It’s novel for 15 year olds as much as it is for those who are 90, and all the ages in between. So talented and so liberating. The story becomes rhythmic and alive with music. Just like a jazz tune, it is melancholic and exuberant.” • “Heart of Jazz is a moving story about growing up, about how strong love of music can be, and about friendship over age limits. Feel-good at its best.”

Other titles by Sara Lövestam: Different (2009) In The Deep Blue Sea (2011) Back To Her (2012)

www.pontas-agency.com

Gabi Martínez

Gone

Gabi Martínez (Barcelona, 1971) is one the most outstanding and groundbreaking authors in travel literature. He published Diablo de Timanfaya (2000), Anticreta (2000) and Los mares de Wang (2008), the latter being chosen as one of the best non-fiction books in 2008 and #1 in the Condé Nast Traveller list. With his book of essays Una España inesperada (2005) he became a reference of the new literary journalist in Spanish.

A travel writer from new New Zealand has disappeared after looking for traces of the moa, an animal that has been extinct for centuries. To better understand the life of the disappeared and the reason why he undertook this utopian expedition, a young journalist decides to interview different people who once traveled with him.

Original title: Voy Original language: Spanish 250 pages Published in 2014 RIGHTS SOLD SPANISH | Alfaguara

The writer´s ex-wife discusses their travel through Italy together. The translator who helped him move to China refutes much of what his client wrote and says he regrets having met him. A Portuguese friend recalls how frightened the writer was of motorcycles and of the days they shared together when she used to work as a stripper. The young journalist interviews many people, including a filmmaker who crossed the Nile with him, his guide in Australia, his current partner… • Reminiscent of J.M. Coetzee´s formula and brimming with Walt Whitman´s joie de vivre, Gabi Martínez has written a novel about his own profession in which he debunks the romantic myth of the Great Travelers.

The True Story of the Man Who Went in Search for the Yeti On 2nd August 2002, Jordi Magraner, a Spanish zoologist was found dead in his house on the Bumburet Valley (Pakistan). Jordi had arrived in Pakistan in 1988 in search of new animal species, though his main (and confidential) objective in the mission was to find traces of human-like feet: he dreamed of finding the Yeti, also known as Bigfoot, or Barmanu in hindu. During more than ten years Jordi travelled all over Northern Pakistan and the Northeast of Afghanistan within the framework of his scientific investigation. A few years after Jordi Magraner’s assassination, journalist and writer Gabi Martínez echoes his story and travels to Pakistan himself in order to talk directly to the protagonists, diving into the investigation of the death of the Spanish zoologist, still unsolved, with the collaboration of Magraner’s family. Sólo para gigantes is the result of his work.

Original title: Sólo para gigantes Original language: Spanish Published in 2011 408 pages RIGHTS SOLD CATALAN | Ara Libres FRENCH | Autrement PORTUGUESE (Brazil) | Rocco SPANISH | Alfaguara Film rights sold Distinto Films in coproduction with Alea Films

www.pontas-agency.com

Maribel Medina Maribel Medina (Pamplona, 1969) studied Geography and History and, after living in India and Nepal with her family for a few years, started working in international aid. In 2011 she founded the NGO Women’s Time, which currently has a number of projects in Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic). Sangre de barro (Still Blood) is her first novel.

Still Blood One Interpol officer with a mysterious past, and an even more mysterious sex life. One young male athlete fighting to fulfill his Olympic dream, at any cost. 6 strange ‘sudden deaths’ in the same elite training centre in Switzerland. One forensic doctor who refuses to give up, professionally, and in life. The international search to unveil largest scandal in the history of sports begins…

Original title: Sangre de barro Original language: Spanish Published in 2014 390 pages RIGHTS SOLD SPANISH | Maeva POLISH | Sonia Draga English sample available

Thomas Connors is an Irish Interpol profiler based in Lyon. He helps international Governments share their criminal databases and frequents private sex clubs with his girlfriend. Janik is a young Swiss athlete competing for his dream to win a medal at the Olympics in honor of his dead father. Within months, Una and Irina, two young Russian athletes from the same centre, suffer a mysterious sudden death. Thomas and Janik are both connected to them for different reasons: Una is the daughter of Thomas’s first girlfriend, and Irina was one of Janik’s closest friends and his secret love. Laura Terroux, the forensic doctor, teams up with Thomas and they both begin an investigation to try and track down the drug mafias that have caused these deaths and other similar ones before them. The search rapidly turns more and more dangerous, and more and more international.

• A page-turning thriller about the mafia and the international networks behind the commerce of performance enhancing drugs and blood doping among elite athletes. • Set in France, Switzerland, Ireland, South Korea and NY, Still Blood is a gripping and entertaining read of timely interest. A jaw-dropping portrait of the current elite sports industry with an impossible-to-put-down plot. • For fans of John Verdon, Katherine Neville, Patricia Cornwell, Camilla Läckberg and John LeCarré. “A very well-written, addictive and very brave novel” -El Periódico, one of Spain’s largest newspapers.

www.pontas-agency.com

Jason Eric Miller Jason Eric Miller grew up in the mountains of Colorado and Montana. Educated at the University of Montana, the University of Southern California, and the University of Denver, he has been a professor of Creative Writing since 2000. The protagonists of Miller´s work typically set out on a journey during a time of intense crisis, in hopes of discovering some better place over the horizon. These characters are quintessentially American, exploring, updating and subverting the myth of Manifest Destiny.

Mistress

He’s not a bad guy—a loving father with a real compassion for the welfare of animals. It’s just that, no matter what he tells himself about what we really wants and who he really is, his home life in the suburbs is not quite enough.

Original language: English Manuscript 215 pages

It’s just that his chosen mistress is no longer willing. It’s just that when he decides to keep her as a prisoner in a cabin deep in the snowbound mountains, he hasn’t accounted for the toll a life divided takes on the body and the mind. A story of self discovery, Mistress is follows a suburban family man who has strayed from his marriage into the heart of obsession. Keeping his object of desire as a prisoner in a snowbound forest cabin, he struggles to divide himself between two worlds. It isn’t that he’s a bad guy. It’s just that the secret workings of his true heart may out at a terrible cost. • A story of self discovery, Mistress is follows a suburban family man who has strayed from his marriage into the heart of obsession. Keeping his object of desire as a prisoner in a snowbound forest cabin, he struggles to divide himself between two worlds. • About Décomposition, his previous novel, published in English, French, Spanish and Italian: “The novel draws you in and is a roller coaster ride to the last page. It reminded me of an adult Robert Cormier novel or David Lynch flick - interesting, intense, bizarre and deeply illustrative that each person’s reality is a proprietary thing.”

Letters to the Second Last Child (Bone World) Written by twelve year old Dane MillerHass and his father, novelist Jason Eric Miller, Bone World is a coming-to-terms story told in a series of letters written from a young survivor of an apocalyptic event to a girl he believes to be alive, too. These letters chronicle his journey from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, where he will collect the bones of his father to bury beside the bones of his mother. In recounting his story along the way, the boy links the worldwide catastrophe to the tragedies of his personal life before the apocalypse: his parents’ divorce, difficult relationships at school, the terrible and mysterious disappearance of his elder brother. 22

Original language: English Manuscript 143 pages

www.pontas-agency.com

Miquel Molina Miquel Molina Muntané (Barcelona, 1963) has been living immersed in the world of communication for almost thirty years, since he first started working as a journalist in an editorial office. He is now deputy director of La Vanguardia, a leading Spanish newspaper. His first novel, Una flor del mal (The Pale Woman from Barecelona), is a result of his other hobbies: inspecting the faces of the people represented in paintings and reconstructing the biographies of these models that are halfway between reality and an idealized character created by the painter.

The Pale Woman from Barcelona Gustave Flaubert, without wanting to, left an unanswered question when he wrote that his Emma Bovary looked like “the pale woman of Barcelona”. To whom was he referring to? A real woman? A popular phrase? To a model in a painting? Did a Catalan Emma Bovary really exist? How was she? Where was she buried? A century and a half has gone by since Flaubert described his heroine. The literature lecturer Guillermo Jiménez starts seeking for the answer somewhere in the triangle formed by the cities of Philadelphia, Lyon and Barcelona.

Original title: Una flor del mal Original language: Spanish Published in 2014 250 pages RIGHTS SOLD SPANISH | Destino / Grupo Planeta

The appearance of a Nazi-sacked painting in a mansion in the Catalan capital will only increase his excitement to find out who she was. Gustave Courbet, Baudelaire, 19th century ladies addicted to opium, Herman Göering and an enigmatic woman of our time constitute this intriguing combination of fiction and real facts.

• The Girl With the Pearl Earing for heart-broken fans of Madame Bovary and its timeless protagonist “A mysterious and elegant story I read with pleasure” - Eduardo Mendoza, Premio Planeta winner and author of La ciudad de los prodigios “A novel about desire and obsession, about history and art, about truth and fiction.” Culturamas “An art mystery that becomes at the same time a passionate story of personal search. Miquel Molina links skilfully the investigation about Courbet’s painting with an uncommon triangle marked by secrets, desire and generational gap” - Sergio Vila-SanJuán, journalist and writer

www.pontas-agency.com

Fiston Mwanza Mujila Born in Lubumbashi (Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1981, Fiston Mwanza Mujila lives in Graz (Austria). He regularly participates in the literary activities organized in his home town, in Kinshasa, Nairobi or Brussels. His writing has been awarded with numerous prizes, among which the Golden Medal in the sixth Games of the Francophony in Beirut, as well as the Best Text for Theater (Preizfür das beste Stück, State Theater, Mainz). Tram 83 will be launched in the rentrée litteraire this 2014.

Tram 83 In an African city in secession, which could be Kinshasa or Lubumbashi, flock tourists of all languages and nationalities. They have only one desire: to make a fortune by exploiting the mineral wealth of the country. They work during the day in mining concession and, as soon as night falls, they go out to get drunk, dance, eat and abandon themselves in Tram 83, the only night-club of the city, the den of all the outlaws: ex children-soldiers, prostitutes, blank students, unmarried mothers, sorcerers’ apprentices, …

Original language: French To be published in 2014 184 pages

RIGHTS SOLD FRENCH | Ed. Métailié ENGLISH (North America) | Deep Vellum Publishing

Lucien, a professional writer, fleeing the exactions and the censorship, finds refuge in the city thanks to Requiem, a friend from his youth.. Requiem lives mainly by stealing while Lucien only thinks of writing and living honestly. Around them gravitate gangsters and young girls, retired or runaway men, profit-seeking tourists and federal agents of a non-existent State. Tram 83 plunges the reader into the atmosphere of a gold rush as cynical as it is oftentimes comic and exotic. It’s an observation of human relationships in a world that has become a global village. It could be described as an African-rap or rhapsody novel or puzzle-novel hammered by rhythms of jazz. • A bursting, young, new voice in fiction not to be missed. • To be published as a lead title of the rentrée litteraire 2014 by Éd. Métailié. “A debut novel with a vertiginous rythm. Picaresque poetry turned into music by a mix of slam and a series of loops and turns as bewitching as a sustained jazz melody” -Sean James Rose, Livres Hevdo “A real discovery among the novels of the rentrée” -Alain Mabanckou, Jeune Afrique “So how adventurous are US/UK publishers? Who will take a stap at Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83? Because seriously- someone has to.” -The Literary Saloon 24

www.pontas-agency.com

Carl Nixon Carl Nixon was born in Christchurch in 1967 and is one of New Zealand’s leading authors. He has written three novels, a short story collection and numerous theatrical scripts. His books have regularly appeared on the top selling New Zealand fiction lists and have been listed for international awards, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize, Best First Book (South East Asia and Australasia region), and the Dublin International IMPAC Awards. His last novel, The Virgin and the Whale, has been optioned for film by South Pacific Films.

Settler’s Creek Box Saxton just wants to bury, Mark, his stepson. What happens, though, when the boy’s biological father, a Maori leader, unexpectedly turns up in the days before the funeral and forcibly takes the boy’s body? According to Maori custom the boy should be buried in the tribe’s ancestral cemetery at the small coastal town of Kaipuna. According to the law there is very little Box can do. With no plan and little hope, Box gets in his old truck and drives north, desperate and heartbroken.

Original language: English Published in 2010 336 pages

RIGHTS SOLD ENGLISH (ANZ) | Random House New Zealand GERMAN | Weilde Verlag

Settler’s Creek examines the claims of both indigenous peoples and more recent settlers to have a spiritual link to the land. The book explores with depth and compassion some of the many issues of race and culture which New Zealand, like Australia, faces. “Brave, bold and unflinching, Carl Nixon’s Settlers’ Creek is one of the best novels to come out of New Zealand. It’s not only a gripping, brutal thriller but also a dissection of a country and its culture. It’s the kind of book that gets you run out of town.” Witi Ihimaera

Rocking Horse Road Lucy Asher’s murder makes a huge impact on all those who live along Rocking Horse Road, which runs through the Spit, a long ‘finger of bone-dry sand’ between the ocean and the estuary. It’s an event that for one hot summer brings together a group of fifteen-year-old boys and then keeps them linked for the rest of their lives. Evolving from Nixon’s celebrated short story, this powerful novel is much more than an intelligently evoked murder mystery. It’s a book about coming of age and loss of innocence, not just for the characters but for New Zealand, as the country turns upon itself during the 1981 Springbok Tour. It examines how early events can influence the rest of our lives, and probes ideas of community, collective memory and story-telling. www.pontas-agency.com

Original language: English Published in 2007 240 pages

RIGHTS SOLD ENGLISH (ANZ) | Random House New Zealand GERMAN | Weilde Verlag COMPLEX CHINESE | Crown

Janice Pariat Janice Pariat is based between the UK and India. Her first book Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories (Random House, India 2012) won the Young Writer Award from the Sahitya Akademi (Indian National Academy of Letters) and the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize, and was longlisted for the Frank O´Connor Short Story Award 2013. It gained further national attention upon winning the prestigious Crossword Prize for Best Book.

Seahorse Set between Delhi in the 1990s, during India’s swift, sweeping liberalization, and contemporary multicultural London, Seahorse is the story of a young man straddled between lives – his memories of the past and the swirling currents of the present. Nehemiah is a student of English Literature at Delhi University when he first meets art historian, Doctor Nicholas Perich. In a few months, mostly within the confines of a colonial bungalow in the old city, his life is transformed. Mentor and littéraire, Nicholas steers him into a world of pleasure and artistic discovery. Years later, during a seemingly innocuous spell in London as a Writer in Residence, the unexpected happens – lives, like passing ships, are re-illuminated. Nehemiah is plunged into a search for the people from his past: Nicholas, his stepsister Myra, and even himself, the young, drifting boy changed irrevocably by his encounter with them.

Original language: English 250 pages To be published in 2014

RIGHTS SOLD ENGLISH (Indian subcontinent) | Random House India

Seahorse, written as a contemporary retelling of a little-known Greek myth, parallels the story of Poseidon, the god of the sea, and his young male lover Pelops. The young men in these narratives must journey beyond themselves to wrestle free from the protective yet stifling gods of their pasts. Like the ancient animal of its title, Seahorse traces how loss and healing, undoing and recreation, may eventually shape us into creatures of grace.

About her first book, Boats on Land: “Revelatory and Original.” Jeet Thayil “Janice’s stories announce the arrival of a startlingly brilliant and compassionate writer whose book is as haunting as the world it emerges from.” Siddhartha Deb “Poignant, subtle and nuanced, a writer to watch out for.” Manju Kapur

www.pontas-agency.com

Dolores Redondo Dolores Redondo (Donostia-San Sebastián, 1969) studied Law and Culinary Arts and worked in business for a few years. Her debut novel The Invisible Guardian, a gripping landscape thriller set in the Basque Pyrenees, sold over 150,000 copies in Spain and has been translated into 28 languages. She currently lives in the Ribera Navarra, where she is already working on the third novel of the trilogy.

The Baztán Trilogy The Invisible Guardian starts with the discovery of the naked body of a teenager, sinisterly placed on the margins of the River Baztán, one of the magical places in the Basque Country and Navarra. Almost twenty four hours after the discovery a connection is made with the murder of another girl a month before. The homicide inspector, Amaia Salazar, will be appointed to direct an investigation that will take her back to the place where she was born and from where she always wanted to escape. Salazar is fighting on two fronts: the professional, where she must retain focus on the investigation of a series of murders which have caused great social unrest, and the personal front, her relationship with her family deeply emotional and complex. The Invisible Guardian is followed by the two novels Legacy of the Bones (published in Spain already) and Offering to the Storm (to be published in 2014). “A novel about the fear of returning to fear.” -La Vanguardia “It reminds us of Johan Theorin and Maurizio de Giovanni, of the short stories by Tana French or of Val McDermid. Like all of them, The Invisible Guardian is a more sophisticated kind of book, more elaborated than the conventional crime novel.” -El Periódico “I was very surprized by it, I really loved it. I strongly recommend it.” -María Dueñas, author of The Time in Between “It’s the basajaun, the other main character, the mysterious element and the original « soul » of the book : man vs the bestiality of crime, ancestral legends vs modern investigation techniques, family traumas vs dark beliefs.” - L’Express “Dolores Redondo has broken the traditional mold of the publishing industry.” -David Morán, ABC “A landscape thriller. And what a landscape it is!” -Page des Libraires Film rights sold of the entire “Trilogy of Baztan” to NadCon Films (joint venture of German producer Peter Nadermann and Constantin Film)

www.pontas-agency.com

Cristina Sánchez-Andrade Cristina Sánchez-Andrade (1968) has degrees in Law and Mass Media. She collaborates in various Spanish newspapers and literary magazines as a critic and book reviewer. Her third novel Ya no pisa la tierra tu rey (Anagrama, 2004), won the prestigious literary prize Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz at the Guadalajara International Book Fair 2005, in Mexico, and has been translated into English and Portuguese.

Winter Women Galicia, Spain’s northwest region, in the 1950’s. Two mysterious sisters return to the small parish of Tierra de Chá after a long absence, united by a very dark incident committed in the past, and by their passion for film and the lives of the Hollywood artists. They return to the former home of their grandfather, from where they fled when they were children. At Tierra de chá, nothing and everything has changed, the people, the distant little house under the rain, the acrid smell of gorse, the flowers, the crops, the customs... For some reason, the return of the peculiar sisters disrupts the placid existence of the villagers. Why does nobody want to talk about Don Reinaldo, their grandfather? What events in the past are the women are concealing? Why are they called «Las Inviernas», the Winter Women?

Original title: Las inviernas Original language: Spanish Published in 2014 250 pages

RIGHTS SOLD ITALIAN | Elliot Edizioni POLISH | Muza PORTUGUESE (Brazil) | Alaúde SPANISH | Anagrama

• Las Inviernas is a charming, very literary and rural story with hues of the Spanish classics and also of last year’s international success, Intemperie by Jesús Carrasco. It is a delicate but dark novel in which the author skillfully combines fiction and historical events while she masterly doses intrigue and a subtle and witty humour (also very dark). • The two Winter Women, or Winter Sisters, both perverse and lovable, will stay with the reader for a long time after the reading. A gothic, rural, quirky literary novel not to be missed. “Something radically new in Spanish literature, original and unusual.” -Manuel Rivas

Other titles by Cristina Sánchez Andrade

www.pontas-agency.com

Paul Spencer Sochaczewski Paul Spencer Sochaczewski is a American-born writer, journalist and international advisor to NGOs on fundraising and communications. He is also the author of An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles, which is about personal travel through Southeast Asia in the footsteps of the18th-century British explorer, naturalist and philosopher Alfred Russel Wallace. Paul currently lives in Geneva, Switzerland.

Share Your Journey You want to share your personal odyssey but perhaps aren’t too sure how to start, what to say, how to focus, how to make it interesting for other people.The secrets of professional writers in Share Your Journey will give you the tools and confidence to write more effective blogs, write for on-line and print publications, and make more effective presentations.

Original language: English 331 pages Manuscript

You’ve meditated in a Buddhist retreat in Thailand; enlightenment eluded you. You met your soul-mate at a cooking class in Tuscany and now make fresh pasta every evening - you’re 30 kilos overweight but happy. You got altitude sickness on a trek to Machu Picchu and still haven’t seen this wonder of the world. You lost your silk shirt in Las Vegas. An old homeless woman showed you an unexpected act of kindness. Or maybe you want to record your family’s history. How Aunt Esmeralda defied her strict Mexico City parents and eloped with a tequila -addled Colombian poet, how Grandma Chen left China penniless, then through hard work and a deft touch at the mahjong table, became one of Singapore’s leading real estate tycoons.All these stories are heroes’ journeys.

Redheads Set in the heart of the jungle of Borneo, Redheads is a story about tribal uprisings, fraudulent scientists, corrupt government officials, greedy timber companies, self-righteous foreigners, and schizophrenic orangutans. In the middle of a Borneo rainforest a band of nearnaked Penan, encouraged by an equally clotheschallenged renegade Swiss shepherd, hesitantly blockade a logging truck, testing their commitment to protect their forest home. Nearby, an orangutan researcher is threatened with being thrown out of her study site unless she can reach a compromise with the powerful minister of the environment.

www.pontas-agency.com

Original language: English Published in 2010 250 pages

RIGHTS SOLD ENGLISH (South East Asia)| Lontar Foundation

James Terry Born in 1970, James Terry grew up in a small New Mexico bordertown, earned his BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and worked in film and television production in the San Francisco Bay Area before moving to Dublin, Ireland, where he lived for six years, teaching English. Since leaving Dublin he has lived and worked in New Delhi, India and Edmonton, Canada. He currently lives in Liverpool, UK, with his wife and son.

The Territory Something is rotten in Shakespeare. Abigail Jonson, lured to this eponymous frontier mining town by the fanciful letters of her husbandto-be, finds herself alone in a desolate world of lonely men. Already fraught with tension, her marriage to Henry, the old saloon keeper, is further complicated by Henry’s impotence. When Henry discovers that she has seduced the teenage bank teller, he exploits the situation for his own gratification. This sets in motion the events that will challenge Abigail’s endurance and self-respect for the remainder of the novel. The climax comes when she stages a production of As You Like It, using a group of men to play the parts of women. This leads to the demise of the town and Abigail’s liberation from the forces that have bound her there.

Original language: English Manuscript 250 pages

Like a Shakespeare play, The Territory is structured episodically, with multiple subplots unfolding simultaneously, each segment focussing on the concerns of one of the novel’s five central characters. The novel also makes a playful and symbolic use of the bard’s universe woven into the novel. The town of Shakespeare is akin to Prospero’s island, a kind of imaginary space with its own strange laws, cut off from the real world.

The Commission The suicide of his brother David, a San Francisco based artist, caught Steven Wells off guard. This middle-aged insurance salesman leaves his family and peaceful existence in Phoenix in order to settle his brother’s affairs. But what Steven expected to be only a matter of days, turns into a month length exploration of his brother’s twofold life (and work) that will ultimately derail Steven’s own life.

Original language: English Manuscript 250 pages

David has not only left behind him a large body of paintings, but also an intriguing collection of art pieces signed under their father’s name, Lloyd Wells. And indeed, these conceptual works have brought ‘Lloyd Wells’ to prominence in the West Coast arts world. These pieces appear to be full of autobiographical elements that only David and Steven could have known about: references to their past, their childhood and, most intriguingly, to their long-deceased father. As Steven investigates the material of his brother’s life and questions the incestuous relationships between conceptual art and capitalism, he is forced to re-examine his own childhood as well as his tortuous love for his brother and to question his own life’s choices. 30

www.pontas-agency.com

Olivier Truc Journalist since 1986, Olivier Truc has been based in Stockholm since 1994. He is currently correspondent for Le Monde and Le Point, worked also for Libération. He also produces tv-documentaries. Olivier Truc has already written two books L’Imposteur (2006, Calmann-Lévy), and Dykaren som exploderade (2008, Norstedts). Both books are based on personal stories, in-depth portraits and interviews. Le dernier lapon however has been his biggest-selling novel so far with 50,000 copies sold in French and 14 translations.

Forty Days Without A Shadow In Kautokeinko, a small village in the northern extreme of Scandianvia, the police try to solve a murder and the theft of an ancient drum amidst raising tensions between members of the Arctic-based Sami religion and fundamentalists opposed to their beliefs. The vast white wilderness of Lapland has become a battlefield, where anger, greed and suspicion reign. Klemet Nango and Nina Nansen are members of the P9 patrol of the Reindeer Police, a specialized brigade accustomed to most of the natural and manmade challenges in the region. But not everyone in Kautokeino wants to see their investigation move forward… • Prix Salon du Polar de Montigny - Best Crime novel in French • Prix Inter polar du festival polar de Reims • Prix des Lecteurs Plume Libre 2013, plume de bronze dans la catégorie nouvelle plume polar, thriller francophone “Set in Northern Norway, a fascinating thriller that makes you shudder and offers the opportunity to discover a mysterious land, the Sami people land” -La Reppublica (Italy) “This novel is a homage to the recovery of identity.” -La Vanguardia (Spain)

The Wolf Strait Hammerfest, on the coast of Norwegian Lapland, has become over the last years the base of the oil and gas development in the European Arctic. It is now the period of the longest days of the year. But clear days do not mean a peaceful atmosphere. Several accidental deaths sadden the neighborhood of the small town. First a reindeer breeder, then the mayor of Hammerfest, then several oil companies managers, but also workers, a doctor... The Wolf Strait tells about a centenarian culture which fights for its survival in a region where development gives priority to the collective interest over the personal fates, playing the benefit of some against the desires of others. www.pontas-agency.com

Original title: Le dernier lapon Original language: French 456 pages

Original title: Le détroit du loup Original language: French Published in 2014 351 pages RIGHTS SOLD FRENCH | Éditions Métailié ITALIAN | Marsilio PORTUGUESE (Brazil) | Editora Aláude SPANISH | Destino / Grupo Planeta

Emmanuelle Urien Born in the seventies in Anjou, Emmanuelle Urien is a tri-lingual translator and writer. She has specialized since 2005 in the genre she prefers the most, thriller, of which she has already written three volumes. She has also written fiction for Radio France before publishing her first novel Tu devrais voir quelqu’un (Gallimard 2009). All this noir does not impede her ability to see in red, especially in her last works. L’Art difficile de reter assise sur une balançoire which has been described as was shortlisted for the Prix Maisons de Presse 2013.

The Delicate Art To Remain Seated on a Seesaw Marriage is like a seesaw: if one side steps away, the other gets shot straight into the air... What would you do if your ideal life suddenly turned upsidedown? If you found out your husband was cheating on you with your best friend? Is it possible to feel dead and alive at the same time, like Shrödiger’s cat? After her husband Yann leaves her for her best friend, Pauline finds herself suffering from a disease common to such traumatic circumstances: she feels both alive and dead, though she admits there is no point in jumping out of a first-floor window and no sense in hating a rival who, ironically, has just died. An unreliable narrator of her own drama, Pauline is an extravagant mourner, dragging the reader into the comical excesses caused by her sad, trivial situation. As her three children would rather have her alive, she struggles to keep hate and grief at bay. With the support of her psychiatrist mother, Pauline comes up with a plan: to remove the source of her trouble, she will declare her ex-husband dead – although the deceased regularly phones the children. Things go awry, however, when Yann actually disappears.

Original title: L´Art difficile de rester assise sur une balançoire Original language: French 250 pages

“Urien offers us a novel full of hope and optimism. (..) This fun and effective read, impregnated by a redemptive self-assertiveness, constitutes a beautiful blow of fresh air in this never-ending winter.” -Ça Depend des Jours • Long-listed for the Prix des Maisons de Presse 2013 • A novel that addresses relationships, abandon, loss and identity through an entertaining and engaging plot • A novel that moves between the trivial and the deep, the humorous and the philosophical

www.pontas-agency.com

Teresa Viejo Teresa Viejo is a well-known Spanish journalist. She has hosted many shows for the main Spanish televisions. Her career took a new turn and became a part of the Spanish media history when she accepted the direction of the weekly magazine Interviú, as the first woman ever directing such magazine. In 2001 she was appointed ambassador of UNICEF because of her solidarity work.

As Time Comes Back Beautiful young Aurora leaves behind a tumultuous Spain (and tormented past) to move to Mexico with the wealthy family she works for as a maid. Little does she know she will be reborn as Vera Velier, a film-reel star. However fate will make her choose between future and past, between returning to the profound love of her teenage years, when the notion of becoming an actress was only a dream, or forever surrendering to her starry-eyed ambitions.

Original title: Que el tiempo nos encuentre Original language: Spanish Published in 2013 250 pages RIGHTS SOLD SPANISH | Martínez Roca/Grupo Planeta

As Time Comes Back is a historical melodrama with touches of mystery set in the first half of the 20th century (1936 to 1944), weaving together the film world, Spain and Mexico. Beautiful young Aurora leaves behind a tumultuous Spain (and a tormented past) to move to Mexico with the wealthy family she works for as a maid. Little does she know that she will be reborn as the film star Vera Velier. Fate will make her choose between past and future, between regaining the love of her teenage years, when her dreams of becoming an actress were little more than fantasy, or surrendering to her starry-eyed ambitions. • Set during the golden Holywood years of Mexico -40’s and 50’s – between the tropical Veracruz and Mexico DF, the capital of filmstars of the time • A story that will fascinate lovers of good b/w cinema, of impossible love affairs, family sagas, second chances, and those stories that take us to distant lands, exotic and sensual, with a bolero tun playing in the background “A masterpiece, fascinating…” -Correo Gallego “As in all good stories, the writing undermines the soul of the characters .Alongside the exoticism of the setting, this story of breakouts and secrets represents the consolidation of the journalist in the intricate world of fiction, where he debuted with THE MEMORY OF WATER in 2009, a successful book that even reached the TV as a mini-series.” -La Razón “A literary trip to the Golden Age of the Latin Hollywood” -El Periódico

www.pontas-agency.com

Rights List

www.pontas-agency.com

Maria Àngels Anglada Maria Àngels Anglada began her career with the poetry collection Díptic (1972), however it wasn’t until the publication of her first novel Les Closes (1978), that she garnered literary renown. Les Closes (currently published by Destino) was awarded the Josep Pla Prize, and Anglada went on to publish numerous novels and books of poetry, becoming one of the most celebrated Catalan writers of all time.

A Violin in Auschwitz In the concentration camp Auschwitz, abuse, punishment and death are everyday occurrences among prisoners like Daniel, a Jewish flute maker from Krakow who thus far has managed to escape death by working as a skilled carpenter. However one day the camp commander, a classical music enthusiast, discovers the prisoner’s skills and decides to put them to the test: he will have to craft the perfect violin. Daniel begins work straight away, entirely unaware of what his punishment will be should he fail. Originally written in 1994 and recently republished to great success, A Violin in Auschwitz is a short masterpiece, a touching story that, like John Boyne´s international best-seller The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, serves as a profound meditation on human dignity and resistance in the face of horrific adversity.

“Read this little book and it will haunt you forever. It vibrates with the sheer horror of inhumanity and the beautiful power of music.” - Tatiana de Rosnay, author of Sarah’s Key

Aram’s Diary With a deft and insightful eye, Anglada evoked the Jewish Holocaust in the much-lauded 1994 novel A Violin in Auschwitz. With the same mastery she sheds light on the Armenian genocide, exploring the oft-ignored massacres through a deeply affecting, oftentimes shocking tale. Aram’s story, written with sobriety and deep sensibility, is a testament to human resilience and the will to fight.

www.pontas-agency.com

Lluís-Anton Baulenas

Lluís-Anton Baulenas is an acclaimed Catalan novelist and playwright. Honored with numerous literary awards, including the Carlemany, Prudenci Bertrana, Serra d´Or Critics, Ramon Llull and Sant Jordi, Baulenas is one of the most widely translated Catalan writers of his time, with many of his novels having been adapted for film as well. His latest novel paints a realistic portrait of one of the most infamous neighborhoods in Barcelona, the Raval, capturing all the beauty, controversy and decadence that make this neighborhood so fascinating.

When The Pirate Comes When the Pirate Comes tells the story of two different, quirky characters joined by coincidence. One, Miquel Deogràcies Gambús, is a 96 year old megalomaniac, the rich patriarch of a multinational company who is guarding a dark secret. The other, Jesus Carducci, is a middle-aged medical assistant in the Raval district of Barcelona who works parttime for Carducci´s company. The two men have nothing in common. One day, however, a common interest impels Gambús to contact Carducci. Sure he is on the precipice of death, Gambús asks the medical assistant to help him fulfill a mission related to the secret he has guarded for so long. A mixture of curiosity and ambition persuades Carducci to accept this mysterious assignment, for he knows there is much money to be won.

Original title: Quan arribi el pirata i se m´emporti Original language: Catalan Published in 2013 250 pages

RIGHTS SOLD CATALAN | La Magrana SPANISH | RBA English sample available

“A robust and magnetic novel” - ARA newspaper “A merciless criticism of Barcelona and especially the Raval neighbourhood” - Diari de Balears “I knew Baulenas was good but not this good: I think he’s superb. It is not often that a ripping adventure-cum-mystery novel offers such a feast of food for thought.” - Julie Wark, translator

Other titles by Lluís-Anton Baulenas:

www.pontas-agency.com

Maite Carranza Maite Carranza (Barcelona, 1958) writes fiction for children and young adults as well as television scripts, and teaches university courses in scriptwriting. Her work has been translated into more than 30 languages, selling over 500,000 copies worldwide, and she has been awarded, among other prizes, the Premio Nacional de Literatura Infantil y Juvenil - Children and YA Literature National Prize in Spain and the Premio Cervantes Chico.

The Fruit of the Baobab Set in the outskirts of Barcelona, this is a story told from the perspective of three women. One is Binta, the eldest daughter in this familiy who came to live in Mataró (Barcelona) as a child and now, at 14, has fully integrated into the European way of life, and aspires to go to university. She doesn´t accept her cultural origins and, in particular, rebels against her mother´s conservative view points. The second woman is her mother, an uneducated woman who lives a completely isolated life, confined to her home where she raises four small children with little communication with her husband. The third perspective is that of Lola, a middle-aged Catalan pediatrician who, after a failed relationship, begins a new life and becomes intertwined in Binta´s familial problems. The conflict begins when Binta learns her father intends to travel back to Gambia with her 6 year old sister, where female circumcision will be performed upon her. Binta deeply resents having been mutilated in Africa; she has begun to date Catalan boys, and feels like an outsider. Initially the mother doesn´t object to her daughter´s circumcision, however soon discovers another reason for her husband´s trip; he has “I cried reading it! It is intense, genuine and brave, without being at all demagogic. The reading flows seamlessly and the characters… you simply believe them, and love them.” Berta Noy, editor of Espasa Calpe • A strongly emotional novel. A novel about moral and justice, and will appeal to the same kind of readers who have enjoyed novels such as The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, or are fans of Ken Loach’s films. • A wonderful, attractive and very well plotted novel about friendship between women under difficult circumstances and across different cultures.

www.pontas-agency.com

Original title: El fruit del baobab Original language: Catalan Published in 2013 399 pages

RIGHTS SOLD CATALAN | Edicions 62 NORWEGIAN | Juritzen Forlag SPANISH | Espasa Calpe

English sample available

Other titles by Maite Carranza available for film rights:

Núria Esponellà Núria Esponellà (Girona, 1959) lives in the Empordà region, in the North of Catalonia. She has worked as a teacher for many years.. Her literary career began with the publication of a poetry book and two novels. She won the Columna Prize in 2005 with Passage to Morocco and has been successfully translated into Spanish, Italian and Norwegian. In 2009 she won the Nestor Luján Prize for her novel Behind The Walls.

The Woman of the Lake He saw her back, ash blond hair, smooth contour and mould muscles, covered with a black scarf. He followed her movement, expectant, he knew she couldn´t discover him, and this caused him the impulse to continue watching her and the feeling of conscious transgression that spying a woman was an unbecoming behavior. But that stranger had appeared by chance and he was just observing. Set in Paris and Spain at the end of the 19th century, The Woman by the Lake is a psychological suspense novel that recreates the romantic era in great detail, narrating the story of a secret love affait between Sarah Prats and Miquel Camps, both trapped in loveless marriages. Their passion will be tested by Sarah´s merciless husband, the influence of a mysterious doctor and rumors in the small town of Banyoles, a society in turmoil after the Carlist Wars.

Original title: Una dona d’aigua Original language: Catalan Published in 2013 484 pages

RIGHTS SOLD CATALAN | Columna English sample available

Finalist of the Prudenci Bertrana Award

“Nuria Esponellà undresses the feminine soul in this story of psychological intrigue.” Europa Press

Behind the Walls RIGHTS SOLD CATALAN | Columna ITALIAN | Tre60/Gruppo MauriSpagnol NORWEGIAN | Juritzen Forlag SPANISH | Roca Editorial

www.pontas-agency.com

Clemente García Novella Clemente García Novella has a Degree in Economics from the University of Zaragoza, he pursued graduate studies in International Economic Policy at University of Aix-Marseille III, France. His studies and work have taken him to reside in Bournemouth (England), Aix-en-Provence and Toulouse (France), Valencia and Zaragoza (Spain).

Being Happy is Easy Happiness, can we learn it? Being Happy Is Easy talks about emotions such as guilt, victimization, fear, anger, anxiety or sadness, all basic and universal, taking away so much of our well-being. It talks about the part of our happiness that depends only uponus. About the kind of people we get to be. About our friendly or unfriendly attitude towards others and towards the world. About our ability to enjoy the little moments and simple pleasures of life. To find happiness is not enough to wait passively: we must act. Because happiness is not the destination of any journey, but the attitude with which you travel through life. Happiness is a way of life. A way of life that ... yes, you can learn. The crucial big step to be happier would be to accept that we are responsible of our own welfare. And that responsibility is what this book talks about.

Original language: Spanish Published in 2014 200 pages

RIGHTS SOLD SPANISH | Ediciones B CATALAN | Bromera PORTUGUESE (Portugal) | Objetiva/Santillana

Daddy, Where is God? Answers of an Atheist Father I don’t remember the exact age, but I know that my two children were very young when they asked me for the first time if God existed. I never had that doubt as a child. I grew up in a religious family. I went to a Catholic school. The existence of God was a given.

Original language: Spanish Published in 2012 190 pages

Of course I believed in a God – the one from the period and the country in which I was born. I didn’t have the option not to believe, just like many children in the world still don’t. For my children, however, there was an alternative; that God didn’t exist was a possibility.

RIGHTS SOLD

Hearing them ask me questions, I thought how lucky they were that no one was going to impose their beliefs on them.

www.pontas-agency.com

ITALIAN | Ponte Alle Grazie PORTUGUESE (Portugal) | Verso da Kapa SPANISH | Urano

Carme Martí Carme Martí (Montblanc, 1972), a Professor of Catalan language, is currently a member of the team that manages the Museum of Rural Life in Espluga de Francolí (Tarragona). Ashes in the Sky is her first novel, written after several interviews with Neus Català.

Ashes in the Sky Neus Català’s life, the last of the Spanish survivors of the extermination camp of Ravensbrück, is the living story of a century and an endless struggle. Her memories, collected in the form of a novel by Carme Martí with extreme sensitivity and extraordinary intensity, are true life lessons over a story that the reader cannot let go. Born into a peasant family of Priorat, Catalonia, Neus Català was a young woman of twenty-one when the Spanish Civil War broke out. Under those circumstances, and animated by a deep desire of being helpful, she was appointed the head of a group of 182 children. With them she took the hard road to exile in France where she fell in love and helped the Resistance.

Original title: Un cel de plom Original language: Catalan Published in 2012 340 pages

RIGHTS SOLD CATALAN | Ara Llibres SPANISH | Roca Editorial ROMANIAN | Meteor Press

She was deported to the Nazi camps of Ravensbrück and Holleschein, where she found hell but also solidarity and sisterhood without limits. “Surrounded by unknown women who suffered the same fate as me, I felt alone and in good company at the same time. In our vast solitude we had each other.”

This book “posesses the same ‘nerve’ as such autobiographical stories as The Infinite Steppe by Esther Hautzig, Medailions by Zofia Nalkowska or Against All Hope by Nadiezhda Mandelstam” -Jordi Puntí, eminent Catalan journalist and writer

www.pontas-agency.com

Carmen Santos Born in Valencia, Spain, Carmen lived in the German city of Düsseldorf from the age of four until she was sixteen. When she turned 30 she decided to leave her post in a multinational company in order to ...to fully devote her time to what she likes most: foreign languages and literature. In 2003 she was granted the first price of the Premio Internacional de Relatos Paradores de Turismo with an emotive love story, La Cumpasita, and from then she has published three novels: La vida en cuarto menguante (Zócalo Ediciones, 2003), La cara oculta de la luna (Debolsillo, 2004) and Días de menta y canela (Plaza & Janés, 2007 – Debolsillo, 2009).

The Isle of Dreams El sueño de las antillas takes the reader to the colonial Cuba of the 19th century. Young Valentina recounts the experience many Spaniards went through at that time, deciding to set off for the New World in search for a prosperous future. The story begins in 1858, when Valentina and her husband, both servants of the Marquises of Tormes in Madrid, decide to leave their life in Spain in hopes of a brighter future in Havana. Little does Valentina know what will transpire once the boat sets sail. She will have to overcome many obstacles, adapt to innumerable changes, will lose contact with her loved ones and will have to learn from crippling adversity. She will be called Calipso but also Galatea, leading several lives at once, and will join the Cuban high society made up of fabulously wealthy sugar cane cultivators. An intelligent and engaging combination of historical novel and romantic novel, spiced with subtle hints of eroticism.

“This book is a homage to Victorian novels, to the big novels of the 19th century, those that can entice the reader still nowadays, by Alexandre Dumas, Pérez Galdós or Dickens.” -La Vanguardia “Eroticism and colonial chronicle merged.”-El Mundo

• An intelligent and engaging combination of historical novel and romantic novel, spiced with subtle hints of eroticism.

www.pontas-agency.com

Original title: El sueño de las Antillas Original language: Spanish Published in 2013 591 pages

RIGHTS SOLD POLISH | Bellona SPANISH | Grijalbo / Penguin Random House English sample available

Pontas Authors Susan Abulhawa Maria Àngels Anglada Alfonso Armada Federico Axat Lluís-Anton Baulenas Stéphanie Benson Alfredo de Braganza Blanca Busquets Milena Busquets Jordi Cabré Belén Carmona Maite Carranza Roc Casagran David Castillo Michelle Cohen Corasanti Imraan Coovadia Terese Cristiansson Antoni Dalmases Mainak Dhar Carmen Domingo Alan Duff Nuria Esponellà

Susana Fortes Pete Fromm Clemente García Novella Brandon S. Graham Ayesha Harruna Attah Susana Hernández A. E. Hochschild Maria Jaén Sándor Jászberényi Ramón Lobo Sara Lövestam Carme Martí Gabi Martínez Maribel Medina Jason Eric Miller John W. Milton Miquel Molina Fiston Mwanza Mujila Carl Nixon Janice Pariat Zinat Pirzadeh Dolores Redondo

Cristina Sánchez-Andrade Carmen Santos Paul S. Sochaczewski James Terry Olivier Truc Eugenia Tusquets Emmanuelle Urien Judith Uyterlinde Guillermo Valcárcel Elisa Vázquez de Gey Teresa Viejo

Other clients Asia Literary Agency Hong Kong www.asialiteraryagency.org In France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, Brazil, Spain, Portugal and Latin America

John Blake Publishers United Kingdom www.blake.co.uk In Spain, Portugal, Brazil & Italy

Lontar Foundation Indonesia www.lontar.org

www.pontas-agency.com

Anna Soler-Pont anna@pontas-agency.com Ricard Domingo ricard@pontas-agency.com

www.pontas-agency.com SĂ¨neca, 31 E-08006 Barcelona Tel + 34 93 218 22 12

Marc de Gouvenain marc@pontas-agency.com Marina Penalva marina@pontas-agency.com Maria Cardona maria@pontas-agency.com Guenter G. Rodewald guenny@pontas-agency.com Leticia Vila-SanjuĂĄn leticia@pontas-agency.com Beatriz Chamussy beatriz@pontas-agency.com

Founded in 1992 by Anna Soler-Pont, Pontas is a literary and film agency representing internationally a wide range of authors from all over the world. Pontas is also a film production company developing projects both for cinema and television.

Cover photography: Beatriz Chamussy/ Ennatu Domingo Soler www.pontas-agency.com